As seen in Gator Six, not all serious games are CG-based. © Will Interactive.

The second annual Serious Games Summit was again held in the Washington, D.C. area (Oct. 31-Nov. 1, 2005), and was as surreal as ever, with an odd blend of enthusiastic game designers, uniformed Army personnel and game producers trying to overcome their cultural differences and bring it all together. What started out as an adjunct to the larger Game Developers Conference (the GDC, usually held in San Jose, California) has taken on a life of its own, with SRO crowds and multiple tracks covering learning games for the educational, government, health, military, corporate, first responder and science markets.

Demand is Growing
The market for Serious Games (also called edugames) continues to grow, and may now be double the level of last year,’ when an estimated $100 million of such games were developed. Serious Games typically lack the budgets of entertainment games, so edugame producers usually do not develop their own game engines (which can cost upwards of $5 million and 3-5 years of time), but, instead, lease popular game engines such as Unreal, Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Far Cry, Gamebryo, Stalker and Titan for game play. Serious Games are made for a fraction of the cost and time of games for the entertainment market, with budgets in the range of $400,000-$1 million being typical, and a development time of perhaps a year.

However, budgets for certain applications seem to be increasing. “We’re seeing some Serious Games being budgeted in the $10 million range, and above,” said Douglas Whatley, the ceo of BreakAway Ltd., one of the major producers for this market.

A real star of the Serious Games arena is America’s Army, which started out as an advergame, to publicize the U.S. Army and help its recruiting drive, but has become so wildly popular (over six million registered players!) that it is now being used for actual training for the military, including giving new Army recruits some basic training before they hit base camp. It is also being used to evaluate new military concepts — players are observed training in new weapons such as the BDM (Bunker Defeating Munition) in order to evaluate whether these new weapon systems should actually be developed and fielded.

America’s Army is always a top draw at serious game events. © America’s Army 2005.

The America’s Army team, which developed the original game for about $8 million, continues to add play levels and fresh content to the game (at a reputed budget totaling around $10 million per year). The team has actually split into three parts, with one continuing on with the original game, another developing specific training for the Army, and a third starting to adapt the gaming environment for other parts of the US government. The game is coming out this on the Xbox and PlayStation platforms, and other licensing opportunities are being investigated. It is available for free download at www.americasarmy.com.

Major care is taken to assure that Army standards and values prevail in the game, and that America’s Army does not turn into the wild shoot-at-anything-that-moves game that is typical of First Person Shooter (FPS) games in the entertainment field, according to Colonel Casey Wardynski, the game’s program manager, whose presentation at the conference was to a packed house. The basic America’s Army game itself is up for a major upgrade, and will be switching to the Unreal 3 game engine in 2006.